How many people play Fortnite? After bursting onto the scene in 2017, Fortnite has since become a worldwide phenomenon, amassing 650 million players across the globe as of November 2023, up from 400 million in May 2021. Why is Fortnite so popular? The reasons Fortnite has become such a global hit are clear. Not only is the game free to play, but it is also available on most gaming platforms. On top of this, Fortnite's most popular gameplay mode is the battle royale mode, in which up to 100 players fight it at once. This means that the re-playability of the game is infinite – each game is unique. Keeping players engaged with live services Fortnite Battle Royale is also a live service game, meaning that the game receives regular content updates to keep players engaged. Each season of the game roughly lasts 10 weeks and features events such as online concerts, and cosmetic changes. The game’s current iteration is called "鬼HUNTERS (Demon HUNTERS)" with a theme around yōkai, hunters and Japanese culture. Live service games are here to stay By offering cross-platform, multiplayer gaming with a live service schedule, Fortnite covers two of the biggest gaming industry trends, which the majority of the industry intend to follow. A 2023 of global gaming studios found that more than nine in ten studios were either working on or intending to release a live services title. With regular, cadenced, and themed updates to free-to-play games, studios motivate players to keep returning and, eventually, spend not only time but also money on the game. This seems to work for the parent company Epic Games – Fortnite was one of the most downloaded PlayStation F2P game in the EU and North America in 2024.

The number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app increased significantly after the implementation of Norway's shutdown in March 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak. According to Airnow, the user amount peaked at roughly 54 thousand on May 23. By comparison, in the beginning of March, half as many people played the royal battle gaming app on a daily basis.

Having burst onto the scene in 2017, Fortnite has since become a worldwide phenomenon, amassing almost 250 million players across the globe as of March 2019. Having first been released in July 2017, the battle royale game took just two weeks to reach 10 million players, a figure which doubled to 20 million players after only six weeks. In less than a year, the game had acquired a staggering 125 million players.

From the end of March 2020 onwards, the number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app significantly grew in Denmark. On May 3, 2020, the popular battle royal gaming app exceeded 50 thousand daily active users in the Scandinavian country and peaked at 56,618 users on May 10. The first coronavirus case in Denmark was confirmed on February 27, 2020. Starting on March 11, the Danish government has implemented lockdown measures to curb spreading the coronavirus, including closures of stores, restaurants, and educational and cultural institutions, as well as gathering and travel restrictions.

It seemed that the coronavirus outbreak and its consequences had also an impact on app consumption. According to Airnow, the number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app in Denmark exceeded 38 thousand in April 2020. This was the highest amount of DAU of the royal battle gaming app in the past year, and a considerable increase of over ten thousand compared to the previous month.

The number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app more than doubled in Norway within the period from March to May 2020. According to Airnow, the royal battle gaming app recorded over 50 thousand daily active users in May.

While the number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app in Sweden declined shortly after the coronavirus outbreak, the amount significantly grew from the end of March 2020. According to Airnow, the popular battle royal gaming app exceeded 100,000 daily active users in the Scandinavian country on May 1 and increased further. The first coronavirus case in Sweden was confirmed on February 4, 2020, but only since the beginning of March, the number considerably increased.

Battle royale game Fortnite has hosted several high-profile in-game events which have drawn millions of players worldwide. The Galactus event, which concluded Fortnite's Marvel-themed season 4 of chapter 2 in November 2020, drew 15.3 million concurrent players and still holds the record to date. In November 2024, Remix: The Finale event set the record for a Fortnite in-game concert, attracting 14.3 million players. Additionally, while not a concert or a special event, the launch of Fortnite OG, featuring the game's original map, in November 2023, was the most successful day for the battle royale title, drawing over 44 million players in a day.

According to a February 2020 survey of Fortnite gamers in the United States, 34 percent of respondents played Fortnite roughly six to ten hours per week, while five percent admitted to playing for 21 weekly hours or more.

First released at the start of 2017, PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds) is one of the most popular games on Steam and had 786,821 peak concurrent players in the last recorded month, January 2025. The highest number of concurrent players was recorded in January 2018 at 3.24 million. One of the biggest games on Steam PUBG gained a devoted legion of fans in a short space of time after its release, and cumulative unit sales of the game hit 75 million in December 2021. The game has also been critically acclaimed — it won the Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards in 2017 and its free-to-play mobile version for Android and iOS, released in 2018, was nominated for Best Mobile Game at The 2018 Game Awards. This critical success has also translated into commercial success, as the game generated millions of U.S. dollars of revenue, most successfully in the United States. On January 12, 2022, the game has become free to play. Battle of the Battle Royale games PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is an online battle royale game in which up to 100 hundred players battle it out until there is only one player or one team left standing. This format of game has become very popular in recent years. While PUBG has a strong following, especially on Steam, it has come under pressure from rival battle royale game, Fortnite. First released just several months after PUBG, Fortnite has since become a cultural phenomenon, amassing 500 million registered users in just six years. As of 2025, both PUB and Fortnite are still going strong with their loyal audiences.

Apex Legends became an instant hit on its release in February 2019. Despite the growth in players slowing down in the months after the game's initial release, Apex Legends crossed 170 million players life-to-date as of October 2024. Apex Legends popular among eSports fans Apex Legends is a battle royale game which pits up to 20 three-person squads against each other in a fight to the death an island. While the game evidently has millions of devoted players, many more experience the game through some of their favorite eSports players. The Respawn Entertainment game is consistently one of the top games streamed on Twitch, with Apex Legends viewers watching in their thousands to see teams battle it out. In June 2024, approximately 7 million hours of Apex Legends were watched on major livestreaming platorms worldwide, making it one of the most popular games on Twitch and illustrating its appeal to both players and viewers alike. The rise of battle royale Battle royale games often include hundreds of players competing against each other at one time and this large-scale game mode has become increasingly popular in recent years thanks to the success of games such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG). While many of the games are free to play, players can invest money on in-game purchases, which include upgrades to characters and players. Indeed, player spending in battle royale games often runs into the thousands and spending on PUBG Mobile even surpassed the 1.6 billion U.S. dollar mark in September 2020.

In January 2025, Counter-Strike was the leading PC game title based on number of monthly active users (MAU) worldwide. Battle royale game Fortnite placed second, and simualtor heavyweight Minecraft was ranked third.

In January 2025, Fortnite still was one of the most popular video games across the world, ranking first among the most popular PlayStation 5 titles worldwide based on monthly active users. First-person-shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II/Warzone 2.0 placed second.

Action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong topped the 2024 list for peak number of concurrent players on the online gaming platform Steam, with 2.4 million peak concurrent players. The action-adventure game Palworld, which was released in January 2024, was ranked second. Is Steam keeping pace with the console giants? The fight for supremacy between PC and console gamers is an eternal one. However, it seems that Steam, the main online PC gaming platform, can still keep up with the console giants. In January 2023, Steam registered a record 33 million simultaneous users at peak time, impressive considering the figure stood at 27.4 million just two years before. One of the main advantages of Steam is the staggering library of games available to users, and it appears that players are not afraid of splashing the cash to play their favorite games.   Battle of the Battle Royale games While PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds reigns supreme in the Steam universe, it has stiff competition in the form of its battle royale brother, Fortnite. First released in July 2017, and not available on Steam, free-to-play Fortnite very quickly amassed millions of players and soon became a worldwide hit. Having scooped the award for Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2018, Epic Games’ smash hit shows no signs of slowing down. But with new players, such as Apex Legends, constantly entering the game, will Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds be able to hold on to their loyal fan bases?

In 2023, children and teenagers in the United States spent an average of 140 minutes playing Roblox games via their mobile devices. By comparison, weekly engagement levels with the Among Us app among players aged 18 and younger decreased drastically from 74 daily minutes in 2022 to 18 minutes in 2023.

In January 2025, first-person shooter (FPS) favorite Call of Duty was the second-most popular game on the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X consoles worldwide, ranking second based on monthly active users. Battle royale game Fortnite ranked first.

In January 2025, video streaming platform Twitch had approximately 7.7 million active streamers, down from a peak of 9.89 million in January 2021. The platform experienced a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many new users used the platform to connect with friends or try their hand at livestreaming. However, this trend normalized again towards the end of the year, and the streaming space has also grown more competitive as platforms apart from Twitch have evolved to attract streamers and viewers. Popular content categories on Twitch In 2024, most of the leading content categories on Twitch were all gaming-related – except for the top spot: Just Chatting. The general conversation category accumulated 2.8 billion hours of viewing time in the measured period. In October 2023, global Twitch audiences spent around 253 million hours watching Just Chatting content on Twitch, with the average viewer count of such content reaching 347 thousand. KaiCenat was the most popular Just Chatting streamer on Twitch in the most recently measured month. Game streamers Twitch is very popular with gamers and gaming audiences, and the ranking of the most popular Twitch streamers reflects this. Ninja (real name: Richard Tyler Blevins), the top-ranked streamer on Twitch, had 19.14 million followers in December 2024. Ninja saw a meteoric rise to fame when he was one of the first top-ranked players to stream the then-newly released Fortnite Battle Royale at the end of 2017. Second-ranked ibai (real name: Ibai Llanos Garatea) was ranked second with 17.19 million followers on Twitch. With more than 9.4 million followers, Imane Anys, better known as Pokimane, was the only woman among the most-followed Twitch streamers worldwide. Overall, women only accounted for nine percent of the top-ranked Twitch channels.

In 2022, the multi-platform free-to-play (F2P) gaming title Fortnite generated an estimated 4.4 billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues. This figure decreased from the previous year when the battle royale title made about 4.8 billion U.S. dollars in revenues.

Video gaming is no longer a hobby exclusively enjoyed by the young. As generations have grown up with video games a normal part of life, the age of the average gamer also increases. During a 2023 survey, 25 percent of video game players still come from the 27 to 42 years age demographic, and 19 percent are 59 years and older. Time spent gaming In 2023, Americans aged between 15 to 19 years spent 98.4 minutes on gaming or leisurely computer use during an average day. The age demographic which devoted the least amount of time to gaming was the 55 to 64 years category. Members of this age demographic spent an average of just 17.4 minutes playing on the computer during an average day.

In March 2025, Fortnite was the top battle royale title across Twitch with more than 12 million weekly viewer hours. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was published by Activision Blizzard, was ranked third with 4.7 million viewership hours during the measured period.